Sunday, January 16, 2011

On the scent

I guess the family reunion has spurred me on to do more than I have been doing in my research. Thanks for the encouragement, Mavis and Mary.

I am, as we all are, the product of several threads in this genealogy quilt. I have chosen not to concentrate on just one thread but to keep pushing to discover as much as possible about all of them. Sometimes that is daunting, sometimes it is exhilarating.

For the past day I have been looking closer at Solomon, the patriarch of my maternal grandmother's family. I am fortunate to be in the possession of the receipt of his being sold in 1839/40 to Isaac Koonce. I was so enthralled with this relic that I didn't even look at the obvious. Solomon was between 14 to 19, depending upon the source, when he was sold to Isaac from the Nunn's estate. I made some weak attempts to discover Solomon's earlier years but now I am in earnest. I want to go back and possibly find his parents as well as his first mate Amy.

According to the census, Solomon was born in Tennessee, South Carolina or North Carolina. I know that the white Nunns and Koonces came from Lenoir County, North Carolina so I approached the moderator of the North Carolina genweb page, Taneya Koonce (so far no relations. I asked her if any Nunns had died in Lenoir County around 1839. No luck. Then I went to ancestry.com. I looked for Francis Nunn, David Nunn's uncle, who passed away around that time. Instead I found something that may be more promising. In 1816, Francis Nunn IV died in Williamson County, Tennessee. This Francis is not the uncle but is a distant cousin to David. What was more interesting is that Francis Nunn's will was not probated until his widow died. Marcy Nunn died in 1839 and there were slaves. Upon further research I learned she had lived in Gibson County, Tennessee. Parts of Gibson became Crockett County after 1870. Crockett County is where Isaac Koonce and David Nunn lived after 1870. Although I could not find Marcy on the 1830 census, I did find several of her children. Two of them, Sally Nunn Mayfield and Joel Nunn, owned a slave that could have been Solomon.